Pot and Alcohol: A Tale of Two Countries

By
Delia Lloyd, Politics Daily
on November 5, 2010

LONDON — For the moment, anyway, the conversation in the United States about legalizing marijuana appears to have been shut down. Initiatives to legalize some uses of the substance were decisively defeated in three states on Tuesday — Oregon, South Dakota and, most notably, California. (The drug’s legal status in a fourth state, Arizona, still hangs in the balance as of this writing.) But halfway around the world, the Brits began a drug conversation of their own. A report released on Monday argued that alcohol is the most dangerous drug in the U.K. by a wide margin, dominating even heroin and crack cocaine.

The study, which was published online in the prestigious medical journal Lancet, ranked substances including alcohol, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and marijuana based on how destructive they are to the individual who takes them and to society as a whole. The researchers analyzed how the selected drugs harmed the human body as well as their effects on the environment, families and relationships, and their costs in terms of health care, social services and incarceration.

The authors of the study — including the former government drugs adviser, David Nutt — contend that this analysis argues definitively for reordering the British government’s current drug classification scheme. In their view, alcohol should join the ranks of the most dangerous Class A drugs, such as heroin, whereas ecstasy should be downgraded from Class A to Class C. (A quick glance at this table further illustrates their point: Whereas in 2008, 40 million people used alcohol in the U.K. and 40,000 died from alcohol-related causes, 500,000 people used ecstasy and only 27 died.)

Needless to say, the rise in drinking-related health problems has also put an enormous burdenon the National Health Service (NHS). Data released two years ago showed that the annual cost to the NHS from drinking topped 2.7 billion pounds (approximately $4.1 billion). This includes more than 1 billion pounds spent on treating people in hospitals due to alcohol, 372 million pounds on ambulance journeys and 646 million pounds on emergency room visits. The total cost has jumped about 1 billion pounds since figures were last compiled in 2003.